Five Smartphone Battery Myths

July 18, 2017July 20, 2017 by sahil kanojiya

Over the years, the batteries in our smartphones have changed a lot. This means that the old ways to stretch your battery life doesn’t work anymore. Let’s take a look at some of the smartphone battery life myths and explain it.

Myth: Disabling Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Location Services Saves a Ton of Battery Life.

It appears like whenever a new feature is added to smartphones, whether it’s Background App Refresher in iOS or Google Now On Tap On Android, is a major risk to your smartphone’s battery life. While that’s true, you don’t have to button every new thing to “Off,” nor is there any benefit in disabling or impairing basic system services like Bluetooth or Wi-Fi just to save battery.

Wi-Fi and Bluetooth were accustomed to drain a lot of power. But, nowadays they draw so less or rather, little that switching them on and off does little for your battery life. As for location services, let the apps that need it use it, but ensure that you don’t have apps that are operating your location all the time without reason. That constant use will still continue to kill your battery life.

Myth: You Should Only Use “Official” Chargers with Your Phone.

Smartphone producers want you to use the official charger that comes with your phone. Glance at any box or guide and you will find that it’s often stated “highly recommended” so that you don’t use any other charger. However, while you shouldn’t use bogus, sketchy or counterfeit chargers, affordable off-brand chargers work well.

Modern USB chargers are standardized and you can find different charge time results with various chargers, that doesn’t influence the battery itself at all. Ken Shirriff examined various chargers a number of years ago and concluded that the time it takes to charge a device varies from one charger to other but, doing so with a not-the-principal charger has no aftermath on the battery itself. This involves using chargers that provide or delivers a different count of amps than the phone expects.

Myth: Closing Apps Improves Battery Life.

Don’t we think of our smartphones as little computers and treat them like so? On your laptop, having a bevy of apps run at once—especially ones that connect to the internet—stresses your battery, so it is practicable that your smartphone would work likewise, right? Wrong. That’s not how smartphones work.

In iOS, apps do not access the same way they do on a computer. When you leave an app, it’s suspended, doesn’t do anything, and doesn’t require any hoard of resources. Closing them does nothing to your battery— except it charges CPU power and battery to close or shut everything. Former Genius Bar technician Scotty loveless explains:

“By closing the app, you take the app out of the phone’s RAM. While you think this may be what you want to do, it’s not. When you open that same app again the next time you need it, your device has to load it back into memory all over again. All of that loading and unloading puts more stress on your device than just leaving it alone. Plus, iOS closes apps automatically as it needs more memory, so you’re doing something your device is already doing for you. You are meant to be the user of your device, not the janitor.”

The same is true for Android. Some people affirm by task killers to deal with close apps and increase battery life. The problem is, they don’t work, and do more harm than good. And, while some apps may close if you remove them from the multitasking drawer,many won’t—It’s all about how the app was coded—and, while some apps may close if you remove them from the multitasking drawer,many won’t.

In the same dash as reforming and boosting your battery, it used to be likely to ruin a battery by “overcharging,” or leaving it wired all the time. When you plug in your phone for long, older lithium-ion batteries could overheat (or explode, in rare cases), which, in turn, just scale down the charge capacity and long-term life of the battery (this can still happen if you have a case that doesn’t allow for heat to dissipate).

Leaving your phone plugged in all the time can still lead to degradation, but it’s inadequate that you’ll even notice. As we’ve pointed out before, if you want to extend the life of your battery, you want to keep it between 40%-80% all the time. That sounds great on paper, but it’s bizarre for someone living in the modern world. The good news is leaving it plugged in overnight while you sleep, even if it’s close to full, doesn’t negatively affect it as much as it used to.

Myth: You Should Completely Discharge Your Battery Before Plugging It In.

Batteries used to be naive and foolish. Earlier batteries would “forget” their full capacity, so they would be unable to fully charge again. So, you’d have to let a battery give off all the way to 0% before charging it again. That’s not the fact anymore, and it hasn’t been for a long time..

Smartphones today have lithium-ion batteries, which don’t go through from the memory problems of older nickel cadmium and nickel-metal hydride batteries. Similarly, lithium-ion batteries count costs differently than older batteries, so you don’t need to fret about discharging it completely.

Here’s how Apple explains it and while they reference their batteries, the rules apply to any lithium-ion battery:

“Charge your Apple lithium-ion battery whenever you want. There’s no need to let it discharge 100% before recharging. Apple lithium-ion batteries work in charge cycles. You complete one charge cycle when you’ve used (discharged) an amount that equals 100% of your battery’s capacity — but not necessarily all from one charge. For instance, you might use 75% of your battery’s capacity one day, then recharge it fully overnight. If you use 25% the next day, you will have discharged a total of 100%, and the two days will add up to one charge cycle. It could take several days to complete a cycle. The capacity of any type of battery will diminish after a certain amount of recharging. With lithium-ion batteries, the capacity diminishes slightly with each complete charge cycle. ”

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